Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?

As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resources could not, as a rule, be sufficiently distributed so that every man could be satisfied. There were bread lines, there were ten year waiting lists for shitty cars, there was corruption. As you state, resources are finite. Labor is finite. Even in a world totally automated by robots, the economy is fundamentally limited by its natural resources and the currently existing capital. In other words, scarcity. There is an interesting phenomenon in capitalism called "manufactured scarcity." New goods don't appear in the market because there is a need for them. They appear in the market because somebody wants to SELL them. They then convince you that you need them through advertising. Without this driving force, an economy goes stagnant. Innovation flounders. This is the reason that command economies don't work, and why no matter what Mr. Marshall Brian says about economic alternatives, he is almost certainly oversimplifying things.

DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers. This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in. http://www.thearmrobot.com/ I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it! The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true of competitions like this, where the goal is to produce software or a procedure, rather than a physical robot, since the winning entry can be copied for free!